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College students can now bid farewell to the invisible PayPal middle man and say hello to their peers online and in person thanks to Intrabid. Created by two Columbia MBA candidates, Nico Clemminck and Holger Witte, the site is out of beta testing and open for business on a number of university and college campuses. Intrabid allows students to create a profile and connect with one another online by bidding and auctioning, eventually making an exchange in person.

The Columbia University campus represents the ideal setting in which this website can thrive for a number of reasons. First, Columbia’s large size and city location means a large college community living in relatively close proximity to each other. While this may be true of most college campuses, Columbia is also located in Manhattan, a fast-paced and incredibly expensive environment for any college student. Intrabid remedies these money and time constraints by allowing students to bid for items online without worrying about shipping costs, also enabling them to exchange items in person rather than waiting for delivery.

An added bonus for the user is extensive corporate sponsorship. Major brands like Apple and Best Buy offer exclusive deals for college students using Intrabid. Users can also compare an item offered by a college peer with a similar item offered at a special discount by major retailers online, maximizing the chance of a good deal.

However, the site may have a major hill to climb, since a number of college-oriented social spaces already offer marketplaces. Facebook, for example, offers its own marketplace where people can place ads for anything from gymnastics lessons to Seinfeld DVDs. Similarly, some college homepages offer a student marketplace. At Hamilton College for example, students who log on to the college website can browse the market place and contact other students via e-mail. And we can’t forget about Craigslist, available in almost all major cities, which gives people exposure to students and city residents. A foreseeable problem could be that although a platform like this is attractive to the recipient, the seller is looking to get rid of his or her inventory to whomever as fast as possible. Intrabid may not be the fastest option given the restricted audience.

The question remains whether Intrabid can synthesize the social sphere with online commerce in a way that is constructive to the user. Certainly, the culmination of online communication between users in positive, face-to-face social interaction could make this site a hit.

-Matt Bachman